This past Saturday my mom and I had our annual Christmas baking spree at the farm. We made five different things including caramelitas, mini chocolate cream cheese cupcakes, sugar cookies, marshmallow balls and cinnamon rollups. I’ve already shared the caramelitas and chocolate cream cheese cupcakes recipes on this blog. Click on the links to check them out. Today I’m sharing a basic sugar cookie recipe. We make these every Christmas. Rolling out the dough, making shapes and decorating can be time consuming, but they’re worth it. My nephews love them! (OK, I’ll admit that I also enjoy the occasional sugar cookie during the Christmas holidays!).
Sugar Cookies
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
vanilla
3/4 cup margarine
Mix above ingredients together. Add:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp salt
Form into dough. Have extra flour on hand to use if necessary. Roll out the dough and make your cookies using various Christmas cookie cutters. Bake at 350 F for approximately 10 to 12 minutes. Decorate. I’m not much of a cake decorator so I usually just put some icing on them, but if you have the time and talent I encourage you to be creative. We made our own icing (or as some people call it, frosting) and then added red and green food colouring. Despite using lots of red food colouring, the red icing turned out more pink than red. Any bakers out there have any suggestions on how to get a nice red coloured icing? And to make our homemade icing we mixed together icing (powdered) sugar, butter, vanilla and milk.
Rural Route Ramblings 
Wow, you’ve got good icing penmanship!
Thanks Candace! You don’t know how long it took me to do those two names! 🙂
I make these with my mom and sis but instead of icing we sprinkle on red and green sugar sprinkles before baking.
Great idea, Gill! I’ll have to keep that in mind for next year. Thanks for commenting!
Hi, Teresa,
What are the measurements for your icing?
Good question, Rachel! I don’t have any exact measurements as my mom and I just estimate. Depending how much icing you need, pour some icing sugar into a bowl, add about 1 tbsp butter or margarine and about 1 tsp vanilla, and then I recommend stirring in small amounts of milk or coffee cream until your desired consistency is reached. If you add too much liquid and it ends up being too runny, no worries, just add more icing sugar. And this icing stores in the fridge for quite awhile so it’s OK if you end up making too much.